Who would've thought a stone house would be so hard to find?

In 2008, as the editing was wrapping up for "Enie," Billie Rae Bates turned her attention to the search for a stone house for the book's cover. She had an idea in mind for how to depict the book's main character, Enie, standing next to the rather-infamous house that also serves as a sort of character in the story. Having grown up in the North, Billie Rae was accustomed to see the big, blocky, stone farmhouses on the Midwest countryside, and that's exactly the kind of house she was using as a model for the house of "Enie."

Smallish, natural field stones, unevenly placed, on a basically cubelike structure, preferably with an observatory on top. That's what was needed. And really, all that was needed was a corner of this house, not the whole thing.

The trouble was, as she was writing and editing the book, she was living in the South. Stone houses -- really, any stone structures -- are much more difficult to find in the South. She asked around. She and her photographer, Charles of Leeway Multimedia, drove through some nicer Atlanta neighborhoods looking for a home that could stand in for the book's imposing structure. Occasionally a flat, rough-faced stone house popped up, but that just didn't provide the look and feel of the stone house of "Enie."

A search on the Internet ensued, in the hopes of at least finding a good photo of a house that the Enie character could be added to in Photoshop. Search after search, site after site ... week after week. She sent emails to various folks around Atlanta -- and around the larger Georgia. She sent out a call through her Facebook account. Every effort was being exhausted, and the house was just not materializing. Billie Rae was tempted to just make the drive to northern Michigan's highway 55, east of West Branch, where she specifically remembered a stone house that would work. But scheduling would not permit a warm-weather trip there.

It was on a drive through Atlanta's Virginia-Highland neighborhood after church one Sunday that Billie Rae spotted a coffeeshop and said, OK ... let's use that. The stone was right, for the most part, though it only went partway up the building. But with the mad Photoshop skills of Charles, it could be done.

Here's the corner of the coffeeshop, as it truly is, before the magic of photo-editing.

Charles took some test shots of Billie Rae, in a variety of poses, to see what would work best with the vision she'd had for the cover.

Finally, with a laptop at Starbucks, a decision was made (the sixth image above -- can you tell? click on the image for a larger version) ...

The edge of the "house" was used as a natural border for the "N" in the book's title, and the blue sky was certainly a nice, and needed, element. Little cropping of the parking lot had to be done, given the structure of the lettering. On the actual book cover, you'll see that the small piece of parking lot in the lower right edge was used rather effectively for the cover's full bleed! (In other words, it was bled off the page.) If that had not been the case, green grass would have been spliced in, to simulate the lawn of the stone house.

All in all, vision became reality. Special thanks to Charles and Leeway Multimedia.